Theft or “shrink” events of products or items are common at retail venue locations, and especially common at high-traffic, or routinely visited locations. Typical practices of deterring or otherwise preventing shrink events apply a holistic or universal approach, where a retail venue location, or other such establishment, will set up security measures (e.g., a security guard who checks products against receipts) that typically apply equally to all products, and without regard to the venue's location or other factors relevant to a shoplifter's current interests, the venue location's geography, or other such factors. Thus, such typical security measures may be limited, or ineffective, especially at retail venues with large quantities of products leaving the store at any given time, where it may be difficult for a holistic approach to accurately monitor all items in the venue location at once. In addition, the holistic or universal approach may fail to take into account changes in shoplifter(s)' interests with respect to changes in the weather, seasons, or other relevant factors which may affect the behavior of a shoplifter or would-be shoplifter.
Accordingly, there is a need for automatic theft-reduction systems and methods for detecting theft events based on high-shrink electronic item libraries that dynamically update based on various factors.
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The apparatus and method components have been represented where appropriate by conventional symbols in the drawings, showing only those specific details that are pertinent to understanding the embodiments of the present invention so as not to obscure the disclosure with details that will be readily apparent to those of ordinary skill in the art having the benefit of the description herein.